Contract Insights

As the end of the third fiscal quarter draws nearer, the fact remains that the manual management of contracts, vendors, bids, and purchase orders can prove difficult and ineffectual.  Methods that involve paying per solicitation can grow quite costly.  Here's how to unlock six key eProcurement software tools for procurement prosperity through the third fiscal quarter and beyond!

CobbleStone is proud to announce that the 2020 Contract Management Conference will be held on October 7-9, 2020, in Austin, Texas.  Read on to learn why this conference is the must-attend event of 2020 to help contract management, legal, and procurement professionals become leaders in contract management. 

Manually keying in new vendor profiles can be a thing of the past with Contact Insight's latest update.  Self-serve vendor registration is now available out of the box with easy company profile creation for vendors, clients, partners, counterparties, outside counsel, and more!

When examining successful organizations, you’ll likely find that they have mastered vendor management.  What does vendor management mastery look like?  Effective vendor management drives value from contracts, nurtures long-term relationships, and is repeatable for organizations managing as many as thousands of different vendors.  The strategy behind sound vendor management is to evaluate vendor performance over time, in core areas, including vendor reliability, vendor quality, vendor cost structures, and more granular areas based on your industry.  This article addresses the critical need for better vendor management by outlining vendor performance management best practices.  

Vendors can provide great results and poor results, depending on who you ask.  Rating your vendors can help your organization determine the best vendors to select based on ratings from within your vendor management system.  CobbleStone’s Contract Insight® software allows users to score vendors on specific categories like performance, on-time delivery, invoicing accuracy, and quality compared to other vendors in your system.  Contract Insight rating scorecards are used to rate vendors and companies you do business with to help you make better decisions about which vendors to use in the future and what companies you have successfully or unsuccessfully conducted business with.  Learn how to easily rate and review vendors in Contract Insight with this guide.

Cobblestone Software is commonly approached by leading organizations, and government agencies, in search of a better solution to track contract spend (contract expenditures) in addition to their contracts.  Tracking contract spend makes contract, procurement, and vendor management more complex and requires a process, or software, to do more than just provide basic contract management.

New Year Goals

The new year is hastily approaching, with resolutions swarming the office, and employees thinking about the months ahead.  For contract and procurement managers, there are most likely processes within your organization that you and your team hope to improve.  Whether your focus is compliance, communication, or overall better management processes, 2019 will be here before you know it, so why not be proactive with your new year goals and start preparing now?